Canada takes equity stake in Cohere

I’m glad we’re investing right before the crash. This makes perfect sense.

Fine, whatever, C$1.6B isn’t that much to the federal government in the grand scheme of things, it keeps a piece of emerging tech infrastructure local. If we have to write it off after a bubble collapse I won’t cry over it.

There is a real amount of university research, public benefit, commercial and defence applications for the tech, that by having it publicly owned we can ensure it doesn’t get bought out by the highest (American) bidder as soon as we have something promising. We really should be doing it for chipmaking and components too, but this is a start.

It would be a total boondoggle scam if he was talking about it as a speculative investment like how he’s selling the pipelines on Alberta’s behalf or the sovereign wealth private-sector-giveaways fund (betting on the future remaining as the status quo is still speculation). But as a measured investment to retain local talent, knowledge and expertise in Canada, it’s a valuable piece to have, and there’s a potential chance $1.6B will seem a cheap price for that in hindsight.

Interesting, I’m good with this, but I feel Cohere is still punching below their weight.

For context in August 2025 GC signed an MOU with Cohere to provide AI to the Government of Canada, but I don’t think any official contracts have been recorded against it. This also doesn’t create any procurement deal, but I think the commitment to 1000 jobs in Canada is good, and hopefully this creates an interest in avoiding something like the Stelco situation.

I do have issues with Cohere not owning any actual compute, despite now 1.8B + 240M (for compute infrastructure) we pumped into them in 2025.

Basically Cohere’s GPU capacity comes from CoreWeave in Cambridge ON, or from BUZZ HPC in Merrit BC (at Bell’s Fabric DC). But BUZZ HPC is owned by a US parent company that moved to Texas in 2024, which to me is also worrisome.

Anyways, yes, I think we need these investments. Even if you’re against AI, Canada needs Canadian AI because the news the last 6 months has been US AI companies owning corporate and government networks, and banning anyone else from that capability.

Carney thinks he’s the smartest guy in every room and he is a full on AI evangelical. As long as he is PM with a majority, we will be going all in on this stuff. And according to his AI for All strategy, the goal is to make you use it.

So augere.ai is dead then?